Kron was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She jokes in one of her plays that her life began on her parents' trip to Europe: "I was conceived in Venice, you know. (Well, not actually in Venice, but in the nearby town of Mestra where hotels are a lot cheaper.)"[2]

Her mother is Ann Kron, born in 1932. Ann is a former antiques dealer and community activist. In the 1960s she founded the Westside Neighborhood Organization in Lansing, Michigan. In a time when neighborhood segregation was the norm, the WNO helped to bring people from diverse racial and socioeconomic backgrounds together. Ann converted to Judaism when she married Lisa's father.[3]

Her father is Walter Kron, a retired lawyer born in Germany in 1922. He was born to a Jewish family, and is a Holocaust survivor. In 1937 as the Nazi persecution of the Jews escalated, his parents sent him out of Germany via the Kindertransport program. He went back to Germany after World War II, serving as a US army interrogator of Nazi war criminals. In the 1990s Kron and her father visited Auschwitz, where he believed his parents were murdered by the Nazis in the 1940s. She later found out that her father's parents were actually killed in Chelmno.

Her brother is David Kron, born in 1963. He is a sound engineer and is married with a son. He says of his sister: "She is very funny, with a very sharp wit...And she always had her own way of looking at things."[4]

In her play Well Kron says that she felt like an outsider even in her own family because she, her parents and her brother David were the only Jews. Her maternal family is Christian and none of her Jewish paternal family survived the Holocaust. Her play 2.5 Minute Ride describes this contradiction as she recalls her mother asking her to come home for the holidays:
"...she asks me every year, 'Are you going to make it home for Christmas this year?' And I say ' I don't come home for Christmas Mom. I have never come home for Christmas. We are not Christians. Stop trying to trick me!"[5]

Kron's family moved to Lansing, Michigan in 1965. One of the main story lines in her play Well recounts her experiences attending a predominantly African American elementary school in that city. Kron's parents sent her to the school in an effort to help integrate it. Lansing began mandatory racial integration in its schools three years later.

Kron became interested in theatre at an early age. She traces her acting roots to the Purim plays that she performed as a child at her synagogue in Lansing. In junior high she was determined to be the funniest girl that people knew. "Her avenue for that was telling humorous stories, something that everyone in her family did…"[6]

She graduated from Everett High School as a valedictorian in 1979. In her senior year she attended special theater classes at Lansing School District's Academic Interest Center. An early mentor was her theater teacher at the Center, the late Robert L. Burpee.

She attended Kalamazoo College, where she majored in theatre. At Kalamazoo College theater professor Lowry Marshall mentored her and helped her land a role with a national touring theater company.[6]

She furthered her studies at Chautauqua Professional Actors Studio and the British European Studies Group in London.

Kron's major works to date are 2.5 Minute Ride, Well and Fun Home. The first two are critically acclaimed autobiographical plays, and the third a critically acclaimed biographical musical. 2.5 Minute Ride blends a trip she took with her father Walter to Auschwitz, the scene of his parents' extermination by the Nazis and her family's annual trip to an amusement park in Ohio. Kron says in the introduction to her play: "Humor and horror are juxtaposed and you might not know for a second whether you are at Auschwitz or at the amusement park. The show does not tell you when to laugh and when to be solemn. The response is up to you."[7]

The play recounts her father's remarkable experiences: "When my father… heard that his parents had been sent to Auschwitz, he immediately tried to order a ham sandwich, to distance himself from Judaism. But he couldn't. He'd say to the waitress, 'Um . . . tuna fish.' "[8]
Kron also reflects on looking at a poem on exhibit during their trip to Auschwitz: "I repeat the words that have undone me.' People burn people here.' "[9] One of the most memorable scenes in the play is when her father tells her about the death of her grandparents at Auschwitz:

…I don't think I accepted it until a few years ago, in Lansing. It was the winter and it was so cold and I was shivering…And I realized this would only happen to them once. They were old and they stood outside, lined up in the cold and they were of no use to anyone and they were killed…[10]

Well explores her mother Ann's experiences with social activism and illness, The play uses physical illness as a metaphor for social "illnesses" such as racism. Kron's description of Well: "A multicharacter theatrical exploration of issues of health and illness both in the individual and in a community."[11] Kron describes her mother:

My mother is a fantastically energetic person trapped in an utterly exhausted body…when she has a burst of energy it's awe inspiring. For instance, when we were very young she decided she wanted my brother and me to be raised in a racially integrated neighborhood, and then she set about to create one.[12]

Fun Home (2013) is Kron's first musical and first work based on an existing work by another artist. Alison Bechdel's acclaimed graphic novel/memoir Fun Home serves as the basis for the musical. Kron wrote the book and lyrics, and Tony-nominated composer Jeanine Tesori wrote the score. It looks at the experience of cartoonist Bechdel growing up in small-town Pennsylvania as the not-yet-out lesbian daughter of a closeted gay man. All of Kron's previous works have been based on her own experiences. She discussed the process of adapting another person's work in an interview for GLAAD.[13]

The thing about adaptation is you have to re-originate a thing. You can't just say, "This is a musicalized version of this graphic novel." It has to have its own originating impulse, so that you feel like the experience you are having is the primary experience. And at the same time, you don't feel like you're watching a different thing, that whatever the effect of the book was, you'll feel like it's represented.

All three works have been very well received, 2.5 Minute Ride, directed by Mark Brokaw, won an Obie award among others. Well was anthologized in Best Plays of 2003-2004, listed among the year's best plays by the New York Times and received two Tony Award nominations.
Ben Brantley says of 2.5 Minute Ride: "(it)… puts Ms. Kron on a level with sterling monologists like Spalding Gray, autobiographers who combine novelistic complexity with stage-smart impudence."[14] Michael Sommers says of Well: "Truly a beautiful play in many ways, Well paints a mother-and-daughter picture of rich, unusual artistry."[15] Of Kron's most recent work, Fun Home,The New York Times'Ben Brantley said it is "a beautiful heartbreaker of a musical," and that "Ms. Kron has already established herself as a vibrant family memoirist with her plays "2.5 Minute Ride" and "Well," and her book and resonantly precise lyrics give this show its essential spine."[16]

The first college performance of Well occurred in the winter of 2008 at Kalamazoo College, Kron's alma mater. It starred a group of students as well as local professional actress Sharon Williams. Kron traveled to Kalamazoo for the week of the run, participating in "Lisa Kron Week in Kalamazoo" which, besides Well, included a performance of the Five Lesbian Brothers' "The Secretaries" as well as a public reading in which she read excerpts from all three of her works in addition to one of the pieces she is currently working on.

The world premiere of Kron's play In the Wake opened at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Los Angeles on March 28, 2010. Leigh Silverman (who also directed Well) directed. The play is about a family gathering set just after the presidential election of 2000. The main protagonist Ellen deals with the political turmoil as well as upheaval in her personal life. Charlotte Stoudt describes In the Wake: "Kron's comedy of deprecation and provocative social critique is part Sedaris, part Kushner, yet utterly her own."[17]

Kron's works are humorous and poignant looks at life by someone who has often described herself an outsider. Her experiences as a Jewish woman living in a predominantly Christian Midwestern city or life as a lesbian working in traditional theatre provide rich material for her plays. Her reflections from the outside looking in are insightful but not bitter. The critic Ben Brantley says of her: "…there is never condescension in her humor. It is simply a crucial part of her navigational equipment in finding her way through life's absurd course of non sequiturs."[14]

She describes her creative process in her usual humorous and self-deprecating way: "I wish I had more of a technique for constructing these things. I keep banging my head against the wall until it pops through on the other side…"[18]

She arrived in New York City in 1984. She worked as an office temp and various other jobs while pursuing an acting career. Some of her adventures during her early days in New York are chronicled in her play 101 Humiliating Stories. She was soon performing at the WOW Cafe, a creative venue for women in the performing arts in the East Village, Manhattan.

In 1989 Kron, Maureen Angelos, Dominique Dibbell, Peg Healey and Babs Davy founded the theater company The Five Lesbian Brothers. The group writes and performs witty satiric works from a feminist and lesbian perspective. "Five Lesbian Brothers was chosen, in part, to refute the perception of lesbian theatre as combative and didactic."[19] Their plays have been produced by the New York Theatre Workshop, the Joseph Papp Public Theater, the WOW Cafe Theatre and others. The Brothers have also toured all over the United States. The Brothers have won the Obie Award as well as other awards and have published The Five Lesbian Brothers' Guide to Life[20] and Five Lesbian Brothers Four Plays.[21]

Kron developed stories about her family into autobiographical plays and performed them in New York and London. Her work was critically well received. New York Times critic Ben Brantley said in his review: "…Fans of that beleaguered literary form, the memoir, can breathe a little more easily this morning. Kron's sparkling autobiographical play Well has arrived on Broadway…to restore the honor of a genre that was slipping into disgrace...[22]Well opened on Broadway March 10, 2006, to critical acclaim and received two Tony nominations. Kron was nominated for Actress in a Play and Jayne Houdyshell was nominated for Featured Actress in a Play. In spite of good reviews, Well had low attendance and closed on May 14, 2006. It has since been performed in Boston in 2007.

While Kron's play Fun Home was having its premier run at The Public Theater, Kron was simultaneously performing in a production of Good Person of Szechwan at the same theater. Kron's unusual experience of working on the final touches of one play as a writer while rehearsing to act in another was discussed in a New York Times article "A Quick Trip From Playwright to Player, Lisa Kron Juggles Two Shows at Public Theater."[23]

Kron received the 27th Annual Kleban Prize in 2017 for the most promising musical theatre librettist; the award includes a $100,000 prize.[24]

"…Judaism, you know, is viewed in the Midwest as kind of an accessory that you wear on top of your Christianity." Well

"I come from a family with a deep distrust of the body. I believe my family would have their bodies surgically removed from their heads if they could figure out a way to still get to the mall." Lithe I'm Not. And Trained I'm Not. But I Danced.

1.
Ann Arbor, Michigan
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Ann Arbor is a city in the U. S. state of Michigan and the county seat of Washtenaw County. The 2010 census recorded its population to be 113,934, the citys population was estimated at 117,070 as of July 2015 by the U. S. Census Bureau. The Ann Arbor Metropolitan Statistical Area includes all of Washtenaw County, the city is also part of the larger Detroit–Ann Arbor–Flint, MI Combined Statistical Area with a population of 5,318,744. Ann Arbor was founded in 1824, named for wives of the villages founders, the University of Michigan moved from Detroit to Ann Arbor in 1837, and the city grew at a rapid rate in the early to mid-20th century. During the 1960s and 1970s, the city gained a reputation as a center for left-wing politics, Ann Arbor became a focal point for political activism and anti-Vietnam War movement, as well as various student movements. Ann Arbor is home to the University of Michigan, one of the foremost research universities in the United States, the university shapes Ann Arbors economy significantly as it employs about 30,000 workers, including about 12,000 in the medical center. The citys economy is centered on high technology, with several companies drawn to the area by the universitys research and development infrastructure. In about 1774, the Potawatomi founded two villages in the area of what is now Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor was founded in 1824 by land speculators John Allen and Elisha Walker Rumsey. On 25 May 1824, the plat was registered with Wayne County as Annarbour. Allen and Rumsey decided to name it for their wives, both named Ann, and for the stands of Bur Oak in the 640 acres of land purchased for $800 from the federal government at $1.25 per acre. The local Ojibwa named the settlement kaw-goosh-kaw-nick, after the sound of Allens sawmill, Ann Arbor became the seat of Washtenaw County in 1827, and was incorporated as a village in 1833. The Ann Arbor Land Company, a group of speculators, set aside 40 acres of undeveloped land and offered it to the state of Michigan as the site of the state capital, but lost the bid to Lansing. In 1837, the property was accepted instead as the site of the University of Michigan, since the universitys establishment in the city in 1837, the histories of the University of Michigan and Ann Arbor have been closely linked. Throughout the 1840s and the 1850s settlers continued to come to Ann Arbor, while the earlier settlers were primarily of British ancestry, the newer settlers also consisted of Germans, Irish, and African-Americans. In 1851, Ann Arbor was chartered as a city, though the city showed a drop in population during the Depression of 1873. It was not until the early 1880s that Ann Arbor again saw robust growth, with new immigrants coming from Greece, Italy, Russia, Ann Arbor saw increased growth in manufacturing, particularly in milling. Ann Arbors Jewish community also grew after the turn of the 20th century, during the 1960s and 1970s, the city gained a reputation as an important center for liberal politics. Ann Arbor also became a locus for left-wing activism and anti-Vietnam War movement, during the ensuing 15 years, many countercultural and New Left enterprises sprang up and developed large constituencies within the city

2.
New York City
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The City of New York, often called New York City or simply New York, is the most populous city in the United States. With an estimated 2015 population of 8,550,405 distributed over an area of about 302.6 square miles. Located at the tip of the state of New York. Home to the headquarters of the United Nations, New York is an important center for international diplomacy and has described as the cultural and financial capital of the world. Situated on one of the worlds largest natural harbors, New York City consists of five boroughs, the five boroughs – Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, The Bronx, and Staten Island – were consolidated into a single city in 1898. In 2013, the MSA produced a gross metropolitan product of nearly US$1.39 trillion, in 2012, the CSA generated a GMP of over US$1.55 trillion. NYCs MSA and CSA GDP are higher than all but 11 and 12 countries, New York City traces its origin to its 1624 founding in Lower Manhattan as a trading post by colonists of the Dutch Republic and was named New Amsterdam in 1626. The city and its surroundings came under English control in 1664 and were renamed New York after King Charles II of England granted the lands to his brother, New York served as the capital of the United States from 1785 until 1790. It has been the countrys largest city since 1790, the Statue of Liberty greeted millions of immigrants as they came to the Americas by ship in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and is a symbol of the United States and its democracy. In the 21st century, New York has emerged as a node of creativity and entrepreneurship, social tolerance. Several sources have ranked New York the most photographed city in the world, the names of many of the citys bridges, tapered skyscrapers, and parks are known around the world. Manhattans real estate market is among the most expensive in the world, Manhattans Chinatown incorporates the highest concentration of Chinese people in the Western Hemisphere, with multiple signature Chinatowns developing across the city. Providing continuous 24/7 service, the New York City Subway is one of the most extensive metro systems worldwide, with 472 stations in operation. Over 120 colleges and universities are located in New York City, including Columbia University, New York University, and Rockefeller University, during the Wisconsinan glaciation, the New York City region was situated at the edge of a large ice sheet over 1,000 feet in depth. The ice sheet scraped away large amounts of soil, leaving the bedrock that serves as the foundation for much of New York City today. Later on, movement of the ice sheet would contribute to the separation of what are now Long Island and Staten Island. The first documented visit by a European was in 1524 by Giovanni da Verrazzano, a Florentine explorer in the service of the French crown and he claimed the area for France and named it Nouvelle Angoulême. Heavy ice kept him from further exploration, and he returned to Spain in August and he proceeded to sail up what the Dutch would name the North River, named first by Hudson as the Mauritius after Maurice, Prince of Orange

3.
Americans
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Americans are citizens of the United States of America. The country is home to people of different national origins. As a result, Americans do not equate their nationality with ethnicity, although citizens make up the majority of Americans, non-citizen residents, dual citizens, and expatriates may also claim an American identity. See Names for United States citizens. S, virgin Islands and Northern Mariana Islands in the 20th century. It also includes influences of African-American culture, westward expansion integrated the Creoles and Cajuns of Louisiana and the Hispanos of the Southwest and brought close contact with the culture of Mexico. Large-scale immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries from Southern and Eastern Europe introduced a variety of elements, immigration from Asia, Africa, and Latin America has also had impact. A cultural melting pot, or pluralistic salad bowl, describes the way in which generations of Americans have celebrated and exchanged distinctive cultural characteristics, in addition to the United States, Americans and people of American descent can be found internationally. As many as seven million Americans are estimated to be living abroad, the United States of America is a diverse country, racially, and ethnically. Some other race is also an option in the census and other surveys, people of European descent, or White Americans, constitute the majority of the 308 million people living in the United States, with 72. 4% of the population in the 2010 United States Census. They are considered people who trace their ancestry to the peoples of Europe, the Middle East. Of those reporting to be White American,7,487,133 reported to be Multiracial, with largest combination being white, additionally, there are 29,184,290 White Hispanics or Latinos. Non-Hispanic Whites are the majority in 46 states, there are four minority-majority states, California, Texas, New Mexico, and Hawaii. In addition, the District of Columbia has a non-white majority, the state with the highest percentage of non-Hispanic White Americans is Maine. The largest continental ancestral group of Americans are that of Europeans who have origins in any of the peoples of Europe. This includes people via African, North American, Caribbean, Central American or South American and Oceanian nations that have a large European diaspora, the Spanish were the first Europeans to establish a continuous presence in what is now the United States. Martín de Argüelles born 1566, San Agustín, La Florida, was the first person of European descent born in what is now the United States. Twenty-one years later, Virginia Dare born 1587 Roanoke Island in present-day North Carolina, was the first child born in the Thirteen Colonies to English parents. 8% of the total population, Hispanic or Latino Americans constitute the largest ethnic minority in the United States. They form the second largest group after non-Hispanic Whites in the United States, hispanic/Latino Americans are very racially diverse, and as a result form an ethnic category, rather than a race

4.
Actor
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An actor is a person who portrays a character in a performance. Simplistically speaking, the person denominated actor or actress is someone beautiful who plays important characters, the actor performs in the flesh in the traditional medium of the theatre, or in modern mediums such as film, radio, and television. The analogous Greek term is ὑποκριτής, literally one who answers, the actors interpretation of their role pertains to the role played, whether based on a real person or fictional character. Interpretation occurs even when the actor is playing themselves, as in forms of experimental performance art, or, more commonly, to act, is to create. Formerly, in societies, only men could become actors. When used for the stage, women played the roles of prepubescent boys. The etymology is a derivation from actor with ess added. However, when referring to more than one performer, of both sexes, actor is preferred as a term for male performers. Actor is also used before the name of a performer as a gender-specific term. Within the profession, the re-adoption of the term dates to the 1950–1960s. As Whoopi Goldberg put it in an interview with the paper, Im an actor – I can play anything. The U. K. performers union Equity has no policy on the use of actor or actress, an Equity spokesperson said that the union does not believe that there is a consensus on the matter and stated that the. subject divides the profession. In 2009, the Los Angeles Times stated that Actress remains the term used in major acting awards given to female recipients. However, player remains in use in the theatre, often incorporated into the name of a group or company, such as the American Players. Also, actors in improvisational theatre may be referred to as players, prior to Thespis act, Grecian stories were only expressed in song, dance, and in third person narrative. In honor of Thespis, actors are commonly called Thespians, the exclusively male actors in the theatre of ancient Greece performed in three types of drama, tragedy, comedy, and the satyr play. Western theatre developed and expanded considerably under the Romans, as the Western Roman Empire fell into decay through the 4th and 5th centuries, the seat of Roman power shifted to Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire. Records show that mime, pantomime, scenes or recitations from tragedies and comedies, dances, from the 5th century, Western Europe was plunged into a period of general disorder

5.
Lansing, Michigan
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Lansing /ˈlænsɪŋ/ is the capital of the US state of Michigan. It is mostly in Ingham County, although portions of the city extend west into Eaton County, the 2010 Census placed the citys population at 114,297, making it the fifth largest city in Michigan. The population of its Metropolitan Statistical Area was 464,036, while the even larger Combined Statistical Area population and it was named the new state capital of Michigan in 1847, ten years after Michigan became a state. The Lansing Metropolitan Area, colloquially referred to as Mid-Michigan, is an important center for educational, cultural, governmental, commercial, Lansing is the only U. S. state capital that is not also a county seat. The seat of government of Ingham County is Mason, but the county maintains some offices in Lansing, the first recorded person of European descent to spot the area that is now Lansing was explorer Hugh Heward in 1790 while canoeing the Grand River. The land that was to become Lansing was surveyed as Township 4 North Range 2 West in February 1827 in what was then dense forest and it was the last of the countys townships to be surveyed, and the land was not offered for sale until October 1830. There would be no roads to this area for decades to come, in the winter of 1835 and early 1836, two brothers from New York plotted the area now known as REO Town just south of downtown Lansing and named it Biddle City. This land lay in a floodplain and was underwater during the majority of the year, nevertheless, the brothers went back to Lansing, New York, to sell plots for the town that did not exist. They told the New Yorkers this new city had an area of 65 blocks, a church,16 men bought plots in the nonexistent city, and upon reaching the area later that year found they had been scammed. Many in the group too disappointed to stay ended up settling around what is now metropolitan Lansing and those who stayed quickly renamed the area Lansing Township in honor of their home village in New York. The United States had recaptured the city in 1813, but these led to the dire need to have the center of government relocate from hostile British territory. There was also concern with Detroits strong influence over Michigan politics, during the multi-day session to determine a new location for the state capital, many cities, including Ann Arbor, Marshall, and Jackson, lobbied hard to win this designation. Unable to publicly reach a consensus because of constant political wrangling, when announced, many present openly laughed that such an insignificant settlement was now Michigans capital. Two months later, Governor William L. Greenly signed into law the act of the legislature making Lansing Township the state capital, with the announcement that Lansing Township had been made the capital, the small village quickly transformed into the seat of state government. The legislature gave the settlement the name of the Town of Michigan. In April 1848, the legislature gave the settlement the name of Lansing. It was home to the first house built in Lansing in 1843 by pioneer James Seymour, Lower Town began to develop in 1847 with the completion of the Franklin Avenue covered bridge over the Grand River. Upper Village/Town, where present-day REO Town stands at the confluence of the Grand River and it began to take off in 1847 when the Main Street Bridge was constructed over the Grand River

6.
Judaism
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Judaism encompasses the religion, philosophy, culture and way of life of the Jewish people. Judaism is an ancient monotheistic Abrahamic religion, with the Torah as its text, and supplemental oral tradition represented by later texts such as the Midrash. Judaism is considered by religious Jews to be the expression of the relationship that God established with the Children of Israel. With between 14.5 and 17.4 million adherents worldwide, Judaism is the tenth-largest religion in the world, Judaism includes a wide corpus of texts, practices, theological positions, and forms of organization. Modern branches of Judaism such as Humanistic Judaism may be nontheistic, today, the largest Jewish religious movements are Orthodox Judaism, Conservative Judaism and Reform Judaism. Major sources of difference between groups are their approaches to Jewish law, the authority of the Rabbinic tradition. Orthodox Judaism maintains that the Torah and Jewish law are divine in origin, eternal and unalterable, Conservative and Reform Judaism are more liberal, with Conservative Judaism generally promoting a more traditional interpretation of Judaisms requirements than Reform Judaism. A typical Reform position is that Jewish law should be viewed as a set of guidelines rather than as a set of restrictions and obligations whose observance is required of all Jews. Historically, special courts enforced Jewish law, today, these still exist. Authority on theological and legal matters is not vested in any one person or organization, the history of Judaism spans more than 3,000 years. Judaism has its roots as a religion in the Middle East during the Bronze Age. Judaism is considered one of the oldest monotheistic religions, the Hebrews and Israelites were already referred to as Jews in later books of the Tanakh such as the Book of Esther, with the term Jews replacing the title Children of Israel. Judaisms texts, traditions and values strongly influenced later Abrahamic religions, including Christianity, Islam, many aspects of Judaism have also directly or indirectly influenced secular Western ethics and civil law. Jews are a group and include those born Jewish and converts to Judaism. In 2015, the world Jewish population was estimated at about 14.3 million, Judaism thus begins with ethical monotheism, the belief that God is one and is concerned with the actions of humankind. According to the Tanakh, God promised Abraham to make of his offspring a great nation, many generations later, he commanded the nation of Israel to love and worship only one God, that is, the Jewish nation is to reciprocate Gods concern for the world. He also commanded the Jewish people to one another, that is. These commandments are but two of a corpus of commandments and laws that constitute this covenant, which is the substance of Judaism

7.
Jews
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The Jews, also known as the Jewish people, are an ethnoreligious group originating from the Israelites, or Hebrews, of the Ancient Near East. Jews originated as a national and religious group in the Middle East during the second millennium BCE, the Merneptah Stele appears to confirm the existence of a people of Israel, associated with the god El, somewhere in Canaan as far back as the 13th century BCE. The Israelites, as an outgrowth of the Canaanite population, consolidated their hold with the emergence of the Kingdom of Israel, some consider that these Canaanite sedentary Israelites melded with incoming nomadic groups known as Hebrews. The worldwide Jewish population reached a peak of 16.7 million prior to World War II, but approximately 6 million Jews were systematically murdered during the Holocaust. Since then the population has risen again, and as of 2015 was estimated at 14.3 million by the Berman Jewish DataBank. According to the report, about 43% of all Jews reside in Israel and these numbers include all those who self-identified as Jews in a socio-demographic study or were identified as such by a respondent in the same household. The exact world Jewish population, however, is difficult to measure, Israel is the only country where Jews form a majority of the population. The modern State of Israel was established as a Jewish state and defines itself as such in its Declaration of Independence and its Law of Return grants the right of citizenship to any Jew who requests it. The English word Jew continues Middle English Gyw, Iewe, according to the Hebrew Bible, the name of both the tribe and kingdom derive from Judah, the fourth son of Jacob. The Hebrew word for Jew, יְהוּדִי‎ ISO 259-3 Yhudi, is pronounced, with the stress on the syllable, in Israeli Hebrew. The Ladino name is ג׳ודיו‎, Djudio, ג׳ודיוס‎, Djudios, Yiddish, ייִד‎ Yid, ייִדן‎, Yidn. The etymological equivalent is in use in languages, e. g. but derivations of the word Hebrew are also in use to describe a Jew, e. g. in Italian. The German word Jude is pronounced, the corresponding adjective jüdisch is the origin of the word Yiddish, in such contexts Jewish is the only acceptable possibility. Some people, however, have become so wary of this construction that they have extended the stigma to any use of Jew as a noun, a factual reconstruction for the origin of the Jews is a difficult and complex endeavor. It requires examining at least 3,000 years of ancient human history using documents in vast quantities, as archaeological discovery relies upon researchers and scholars from diverse disciplines, the goal is to interpret all of the factual data, focusing on the most consistent theory. In this case, it is complicated by long standing politics and religious, Jacob and his family migrated to Ancient Egypt after being invited to live with Jacobs son Joseph by the Pharaoh himself. The patriarchs descendants were later enslaved until the Exodus led by Moses, traditionally dated to the 13th century BCE, Modern archaeology has largely discarded the historicity of the Patriarchs and of the Exodus story, with it being reframed as constituting the Israelites inspiring national myth narrative. The growth of Yahweh-centric belief, along with a number of practices, gradually gave rise to a distinct Israelite ethnic group

8.
The Holocaust
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The Holocaust, also referred to as the Shoah, was a genocide in which some six million European Jews were killed by Adolf Hitlers Nazi Germany, and the World War II collaborators with the Nazis. The victims included 1.5 million children, and represented about two-thirds of the nine million Jews who had resided in Europe, killings took place throughout German-occupied Europe, as well as within Nazi Germany, and across all territories controlled by its allies. Other victims of Nazi crimes included ethnic Poles and other Slavs, Soviet citizens and Soviet POWs, communists, homosexuals, Freemasons, Jehovahs Witnesses, some 42,500 detention facilities were utilized in the concentration of victims for the purpose of gross violations of human rights. Over 200,000 people are estimated to have been Holocaust perpetrators, the persecution was carried out in stages, culminating in the policy of extermination of European Jews termed the Final Solution to the Jewish Question. Following Hitlers rise to power, the German government passed laws to exclude Jews from civil society, starting in 1933 the Nazis began to establish a network of concentration camps. After the outbreak of war in 1939 both German and foreign Jews were herded into wartime ghettos, in 1941, as Germany began to conquer new territory in the East, all anti-Jewish measures radicalized. Specialized paramilitary units called Einsatzgruppen murdered around two million Jews in mass shootings actions in less than a year, by mid-1942, victims were being regularly transported by freight trains to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, most were systematically killed in gas chambers. This continued until the end of World War II in Europe in April–May 1945, the most notable exception was the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943, when thousands of poorly-armed Jewish fighters held the Waffen-SS at bay for four weeks. An estimated 20, 000–30,000 Jewish partisans actively fought against the Nazis, French Jews took part in the French Resistance, which conducted a guerilla campaign against the Nazis and Vichy French authorities. Over a hundred armed Jewish uprisings took place, the term holocaust comes from the Greek adjective holókaustos, a variant of holókautos, referring to an animal sacrifice offered to a god in which the whole animal is completely burnt. Often used substantively in apposition with the noun thysia, the term appears in a fragment of pseudo-Callisthenes, writing in Latin, Jerome Latinized the Greek word as a neuter noun holocaustum, using it to translate references to the Jewish burnt offering in his translations of Exodus and Leviticus. In his Chronicon de rebus gestis Ricardi Primi, Richard of Devizes, the English poet John Milton had used the word to denote a conflagration in his 1671 poem Samson Agonistes and the word gradually developed to mean a massacre thereon. The term was used in the 1950s by historians as a translation of the Jewish word shoah to refer specifically to the Nazi genocide of Jews, the television mini-series Holocaust is credited with introducing the term into common parlance after 1978. The biblical word shoah, meaning calamity became the standard Hebrew term for the Holocaust as early as the 1940s, especially in Europe and Israel. Shoah is preferred by some Jews for several reasons including the offensive nature of the word holocaust which they take to refer to the Greek pagan custom. The Nazis used the phrase Final Solution to the Jewish Question, all branches of Germanys bureaucracy were engaged in the logistics that led to the genocides, turning the Third Reich into what one Holocaust scholar, Michael Berenbaum, has called a genocidal state. Every arm of the countrys sophisticated bureaucracy was involved in the killing process, as prisoners entered the death camps, they were made to surrender all personal property, which was catalogued and tagged before being sent to Germany to be reused or recycled. Berenbaum writes that the Final Solution of the Jewish question was in the eyes of the perpetrators, through a concealed account, the German National Bank helped launder valuables stolen from the victims

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Nazism
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National Socialism, more commonly known as Nazism, is the ideology and practice associated with the 20th-century German Nazi Party and Nazi Germany, as well as other far-right groups. Nazism subscribed to theories of racial hierarchy and Social Darwinism, identifying Germans as part of what Nazis regarded as an Aryan or Nordic master race and it aimed to overcome social divisions and create a homogeneous society, unified on the basis of racial purity. The term National Socialism arose out of attempts to create a nationalist redefinition of socialism, the Nazi Partys precursor, the Pan-German nationalist and anti-Semitic German Workers Party, was founded on 5 January 1919. By the early 1920s, Adolf Hitler assumed control of the organisation, following the Holocaust and German defeat in World War II, only a few fringe racist groups, usually referred to as neo-Nazis, still describe themselves as following National Socialism. The full name of Adolf Hitlers party was Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, the shorthand Nazi was formed from the first two syllables of the German pronunciation of the word national. The term was in use before the rise of the NSDAP as a colloquial and derogatory word for a peasant, characterizing an awkward. It derived from Ignaz, being a version of Ignatius, a common name in Bavaria. Opponents seized on this and shortened the first word of the name, Nationalsozialistische. The NSDAP briefly adopted the Nazi designation, attempting to reappropriate the term, the use of Nazi Germany, Nazi regime, and so on was popularised by German exiles abroad. From them, the spread into other languages and was eventually brought back to Germany after World War II. In English, Nazism is a name for the ideology the party advocated. The majority of scholars identify Nazism in practice as a form of far-right politics, far-right themes in Nazism include the argument that superior people have a right to dominate over other people and purge society of supposed inferior elements. Adolf Hitler and other proponents officially portrayed Nazism as being neither left- nor right-wing, but the politicians of the Right deserve exactly the same reproach. It was through their miserable cowardice that those ruffians of Jews who came into power in 1918 were able to rob the nation of its arms, a major inspiration for the Nazis were the far-right nationalist Freikorps, paramilitary organisations that engaged in political violence after World War I. The Nazis stated the alliance was purely tactical and there remained substantial differences with the DNVP, the Nazis described the DNVP as a bourgeois party and called themselves an anti-bourgeois party. After the elections in 1932, the alliance broke after the DNVP lost many of its seats in the Reichstag, the Nazis denounced them as an insignificant heap of reactionaries. The DNVP responded by denouncing the Nazis for their socialism, their violence. Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was pressured to abdicate the throne and flee into exile amidst an attempted communist revolution in Germany, there were factions in the Nazi Party, both conservative and radical

10.
Kindertransport
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The Kindertransport was an organised rescue effort that took place during the nine months prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. The United Kingdom took in nearly 10,000 predominantly Jewish children from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, the children were placed in British foster homes, hostels, schools and farms. Often they were the members of their families who survived the Holocaust. World Jewish Relief was established in 1933 to support in whatever way possible the needs of Jews both in Germany and Austria, records for many of the children who arrived in the UK through the Kindertransports are maintained by World Jewish Relief. Among other measures, they requested that the British government permit the admission of unaccompanied Jewish children. The British Cabinet debated the issue the day and subsequently prepared a Bill to present to Parliament of the United Kingdom Parliament. No limit upon the number of refugees was ever publicly announced. Initially, the Jewish refugee agencies considered 5,000 as a target goal. The groups, though considering all refugees, were specifically allied under an organisation called the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany. This organisation was considering only the rescue of children, who would need to leave their parents behind in Germany, the agencies promised to find homes for all the children. They also promised to fund the operation and to ensure none of the refugees would become a financial burden on the public. Every child would have a guarantee of £50 sterling to finance his or her eventual re-emigration, in that Parliamentary debate on refugees of 21 November 1938, Home Secretary Samuel Hoare paid particular attention to the plight of children, as recorded in Hansard. World Jewish Relief were involved in the rescue operation, on 25 November, British citizens heard an appeal for foster homes on the BBC Home Service radio station from Viscount Samuel. Soon there were 500 offers, and RCM volunteers started visiting possible foster homes and they did not insist that prospective homes for Jewish children should be Jewish homes. Nor did they probe too carefully into the motives and character of the families, it was sufficient for the houses to look clean, once the children were identified or grouped by list, their guardians or parents were issued a travel date and departure details. They could only take a small sealed suitcase with no valuables, / This document requires no visa. / The first party of nearly 200 children arrived in Harwich on 2 December, in the following nine months almost 10,000 unaccompanied, mainly Jewish, children travelled to England. There were also Kindertransports to other countries, such as France, Belgium, initially the children came mainly from Germany and Austria

11.
Christian
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A Christian is a person who follows or adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. Christian derives from the Koine Greek word Christós, a translation of the Biblical Hebrew term mashiach, while there are diverse interpretations of Christianity which sometimes conflict, they are united in believing that Jesus has a unique significance. The term Christian is also used as an adjective to describe anything associated with Christianity, or in a sense all that is noble, and good. According to a 2011 Pew Research Center survey, there were 2.2 billion Christians around the world in 2010, by 2050, the Christian population is expected to exceed 3 billion. According to a 2012 Pew Research Center survey Christianity will remain the worlds largest religion in 2050, about half of all Christians worldwide are Catholic, while more than a third are Protestant. Orthodox communions comprise 12% of the worlds Christians, other Christian groups make up the remainder. Christians make up the majority of the population in 158 countries and territories,280 million Christian live as a minority. In the Greek Septuagint, christos was used to translate the Hebrew מָשִׁיחַ, in other European languages, equivalent words to Christian are likewise derived from the Greek, such as Chrétien in French and Cristiano in Spanish. The second mention of the term follows in Acts 26,28, where Herod Agrippa II replied to Paul the Apostle, Then Agrippa said unto Paul, Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian. The third and final New Testament reference to the term is in 1 Peter 4,16, which believers, Yet if as a Christian, let him not be ashamed. The city of Antioch, where someone gave them the name Christians, had a reputation for coming up with such nicknames, in the Annals he relates that by vulgar appellation commonly called Christians and identifies Christians as Neros scapegoats for the Great Fire of Rome. Another term for Christians which appears in the New Testament is Nazarenes which is used by the Jewish lawyer Tertullus in Acts 24, the Hebrew equivalent of Nazarenes, Notzrim, occurs in the Babylonian Talmud, and is still the modern Israeli Hebrew term for Christian. A wide range of beliefs and practices is found across the world among those who call themselves Christian, denominations and sects disagree on a common definition of Christianity. Most Baptists and fundamentalists, for example, would not acknowledge Mormonism or Christian Science as Christian, in fact, the nearly 77 percent of Americans who self-identify as Christian are a diverse pluribus of Christianities that are far from any collective unity. The identification of Jesus as the Messiah is not accepted by Judaism, the term for a Christian in Hebrew is נוּצְרי, a Talmudic term originally derived from the fact that Jesus came from the Galilean village of Nazareth, today in northern Israel. Adherents of Messianic Judaism are referred to in modern Hebrew as יְהוּדִים מָשִׁיחַיים, the term Nasara rose to prominence in July 2014, after the Fall of Mosul to the terrorist organization Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. The nun or ن— the first letter of Nasara—was spray-painted on the property of Christians ejected from the city, where there is a distinction, Nasrani refers to people from a Christian culture and Masihi is used by Christians themselves for those with a religious faith in Jesus. In some countries Nasrani tends to be used generically for non-Muslim Western foreigners, another Arabic word sometimes used for Christians, particularly in a political context, is Ṣalībī from ṣalīb which refers to Crusaders and has negative connotations

Chelmno extermination camp did not have direct rail connections. Jews were delivered by train to Koło, then to nearby Powiercie, and in overcrowded lorries to camp. They were forced to abandon their bundles along the way. At the manor house in Chełmno, they were compelled to undress for transport to a bath, unaware that it was the final stage of their lives. In this photo, loading of victims sent from the ghetto in Łódź